The monster will seek a mate in Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s new Frankenstein movie. Cameras are set to roll on the film later this year, and we now know what it’s about, and who will be starring in it. Deadline reports that Netflix has put the film into production, and has the film’s logline: “A lonely Frankenstein [the monster] travels to 1930s Chicago to seek the aid of a Dr. Euphronius in creating a companion for himself. The two reinvigorate a murdered young woman and the Bride is born. She is beyond what either of them intended, igniting a combustible romance, the attention of the police and a wild and radical social movement.”
Christian Bale will star as the monster; appearing alongside him will be a star-studded cast featuring Jessie Buckley, Annette Bening, Penélope Cruz, and Gyllenhaal‘s husband, Peter Sarsgaard. The film will be Gyllenhaal‘s second feature as director, after 2021’s Elena Ferrante adaptation The Lost Daughter.
Who is the Bride of Frankenstein?
Mary Shelley‘s 1818 novel Frankenstein does include a sequence in which Dr. Frankenstein builds a mate for his creation; however, he destroys it before it can be brought to life, despairing at the possibility of his fearsome creature reproducing. Many subsequent film and TV adaptations have expanded on that concept; most famous, of course, is the 1935 Universal Monsters classic Bride of Frankenstein, in which the monster’s mate is brought to iconic, beehive-wigged life by Elsa Lanchester (who also plays Shelley in a prologue). 1985’s The Bride features Jennifer Beals as the Frankenstein’s creation Eva, while the 1994 Kenneth Branagh adaptation Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein twists the novel’s ending, making Henry Frankenstein’s bride Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) into a patchwork revenant herself. A revisionist take on the creature features in the Showtime TV series Penny Dreadful, in which she is played by Billie Piper. A Bride of Frankenstein remake was to be part of Universal‘s Dark Universe, but like most of that ill-starred attempt at a cinematic universe, it did not come to be. This year’s awards darling Poor Things is a take on the Bride, as well, with Emma Stone winning accolades for her performance as the reanimated creature.
The as-yet-untitled Frankenstein movie will be produced by Emma Tillinger Koskoff (Joker), Gyllenhaal, Talia Kleinhendler, and Osnant Handelsman-Keren; Kleinhelder and Handelsman-Keren also produced The Lost Daughter. Courtney Kivowitz and Carla Raij (Maestro) will executive produce.
Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s untitled Frankenstein movie will film later this year; a release date has not yet been set.
via Collider